The Public Prosecutor Read online

  Hervé van Reyn chortled. “I have every respect for your candidness,” he retorted.

  “So, the target lives at the address provided and is to be screened for adultery.”

  “You could put it that way, yes.”

  “When do we begin?”

  Van Reyn thought for a moment. “Let’s say early tomorrow morning.”

  “We’ll have to find an appropriate place to keep an eye on the house and a parking space for the liaison vehicle, which will take care of surveillance.”

  “I imagine you will need to get into position under cover of darkness?”

  “Precisely, monsieur.”

  “Agreed. How much should we transfer?”

  “The amount you spoke of earlier.”

  “It’ll be taken care of.”

  “How can I reach you?”

  “I’ll call you three times each day and you can tell me then if you have any news.”

  “That’s a deal.”

  “Fair and square, Mr Marlowe.”

  “I’m not Mr Marlowe, but we’re proud of the company name.”

  “The money should be in your account within the hour.”

  “OK. Would you be good enough to use a code name when you call?”

  Hervé van Reyn thought for a moment. “Perálta, with the accent on the first a,” he said, thinking of Josemaría Escrivá, the self-styled “Marquis of Perálta”.

  “Understood, thank you. I’ll hear from you tomorrow, Perálta. By the way, do you have a photo of the target?”

  “No, but a chauffeur collects him every morning from home.”

  “Thank you.”

  Van Reyn ended the call, walked over to the fax machine, removed the bundle of pages from the tray, put them in a mica-coated folder, placed it on his desk and sat down. His eyes narrowed and his amenable expression faded. How was he going to trace Public Prosecutor Savelkoul’s Swiss bank account? Family connections in the Belgian and Luxembourg bank world had allowed him to establish contact with a Swiss national living in Zurich, a member of the council of commissioners of Credit Suisse and an Opus Dei supernumerary. The man could easily penetrate the closed world of the Swiss banking system with the assistance of a number of Opus Dei cooperators. He had helped van Reyn before with what had seemed at first to be a hopeless case. He had discovered that details of incoming and outgoing telephone connections were stored in the computer of every Swiss bank for twelve months. If they could trace the telephone number in the system, additional connections would allow them to establish the code and bank account numbers of certain customers, allowing automatic access to their portfolio, account activity and balance. But that was only one of the methods. Every case deserved its own approach.

  From an ethical perspective, such procedures were unacceptable, of course, and were even punishable by Swiss law, but Opus Dei had little concern for the law if its own interests were at stake. The members refer to themselves with good reason as humanity’s “general staff ” and to non-members as “the rank and file”. As a consequence, albeit unspoken, everything outside Opus Dei is shut out, excluded, godless, impure, faithless, damned, outlawed.

  When it came to serving the interests of Opus Dei, Hervé van Reyn had no scruples whatsoever. He called this his Sacred Brazenness. He made frequent use of the global network of numeraries and cooperators in the bank world, multinationals, politics, the judiciary, the diplomatic service, the military, the government, journalism, the cultural and academic world, the media, the police, local government. The Opus Dei code word Pax opened every door.

  He consulted his notebook for a second time and used his mobile to call a number in Zurich.

  “Grüezi. May I speak to Mr Jacobi, please?” His otherwise perfect German had developed a Swiss accent.

  An innocent expression transformed his face as he waited. He smiled engagingly, like an excited camper, and the skin of his face appeared to swell slightly, taking on a doughy texture, without a single wrinkle.

  Albert always became a different person when he was riding. It aroused something within him halfway between a condottiere from the Italian Renaissance and a prairie Indian on a mustang. His powers of observation were also transformed. He had carried the conviction from early childhood that he was a man of the wild, his senses alert, with what he called a reptilian memory - something he also admired in horses - the ability to recall the exact place and circumstances of events even if they had taken place years before.

  Around noon that day, the temperature was seventy-five degrees and there was a light easterly breeze. Yamma and Soliman behaved as one might expect of a couple of thoroughbreds in such pleasant spring weather: alert and unpredictable in a manner typical of correct blood, as equestrians call it. As usual, Albert rode Soliman, a five-year-old dark-brown gelding with a star on his forehead and three white hoofs, the offspring of Yamma and the renowned stallion Od’ Aventure. He had broken him in a year earlier using the Monty Roberts method, named after an American who could talk to horses in their own language. No one else had ever ridden Soliman, not even Louise. This explained why Albert regularly boasted that he and Soliman could understand one another at a nod. He claimed to know instinctively how Soliman would react to something and explained this affinity between horse and rider as a shared equus awareness, a secret he tested whenever possible, without anyone noticing except himself and Soliman.

  They cantered side by side along a dirt track. At the other side of the woods there was an open pasture with wild pine trees and a single oak, a leftover of Napoleon’s obsessive desire to have deciduous trees planted along every road. Soliman had the habit of flattening his right ear and changing his gallop when he caught sight of the oak. Albert knew why. While he was still something of a novice, Soliman had been badly scared by a pheasant, which had fluttered loudly into the air in front of him close to the same oak. He had reacted like an “immature colt”, bucked and leaped into the air, his back tense, all four hoofs off the ground. Albert had been thrown from his saddle and had fallen to the ground with a hard thud. It left him with three days of back pain and a sprained wrist, but he had not been upset with Soliman. The horse had reacted “correctly”, and what’s more, no other horseman would have been able to stay in the saddle in the same circumstances. Louise had enjoyed a good laugh at “grandpa”, who always insisted on riding young horses, and had given Yamma’s son a telling off for his “quirky behaviour”. Albert had bought Yamma for her three years earlier, a thoroughbred mare with an impressive family tree. Her foal Soliman was too young to ride in those days, but when they read in his pedigree that his father had been Od’ Aventure, he had purchased him immediately. In fact, Soliman was the first horse he ever had ridden that was his and his alone.

  When Soliman caught sight of the oak, his right ear flattened as expected and his gallop changed to allow him to veer swiftly to the left if the need presented itself. Albert started to talk to his horse, and although he had done something wrong, he refused to tell him off. He tried to give him the impression that he was in full control and did his best to be a little bit ahead of him every time, forcing him to stay in gallop at the moment his ear flattened. That was horse-riding at its best, he thought, befitting a horseman of the old school. He had always spent his holidays on the farm when he was young (when real farms and real farmers still existed) and he didn’t consider himself a city person. He knew every last corner of the Kempen and constantly scanned the horizon for changes in the landscape. He could immediately identify every bird call and every bird. Louise thought it was all bullshit: she couldn’t even tell the difference between a pigeon and a seagull. When they walked together in the countryside she would mock him a little if he followed animal trails or pointed to rabbit tracks at the edge of a field. He once made a trap from copper wire and got up before dawn to see if he had caught a rabbit. Poaching - an infringement of article four of the 1882 Hunting Code - was a risky business, especially in his position. He marinated his catch in red wine and ser
ved it up with potatoes and apple sauce just like in the good old days. She enjoyed it but thought it was a lot of work for something you could buy frozen from the supermarket. Such reactions convinced Albert that he belonged to a generation that had “continued to live the nineteenth century in the twentieth”. He had no regrets whatsoever.

  As with so many things in his life, his desire to pass on “knowledge” to the younger generation was the result of a sort of superstition that fascinated him to the core - astrology. A few years earlier he had invited a renowned Dutch astrologer of Indian origin to prepare his horoscope. The man had discovered that Chiron exercised an enormous influence on Aries, his star sign. Albert was particularly proud of this fact, since Chiron, the centaur from Greek mythology, was a creature with a great deal of intuitive knowledge it desired to pass on to future generations. Louise, a Gemini, was a poor student and that saddened him. He saw her as a typical example of the postWar soft generation, who had never had to make an effort, took everything for granted and struggled to appreciate most things. His friend Lev Hirschhorn, a diamond merchant from Antwerp who had been raised on a kibbutz, put it like this: “They’re children without real experience, not like we used to be back then. We were forced to sleep with a sten gun under our pillows.”

  Louise could spend hours on end in an armchair, smoking and browsing through fashion magazines, with pop music playing so loud it was impossible to hold a conversation. Fetching a frozen dinner from the deep freeze and tossing it in the microwave was her only domestic chore, that and taking care of the horses. Albert always had a good laugh at the way she groomed them. He knew the right way to go about it, and had even taken the trouble to learn how to hot-shoe horses at the blacksmith’s. Cold-shoeing, which was now the fashion, was beyond him, but he thought the purchase of a forge for two horses was taking things a little too far.

  Once the oak was behind them, Soliman was completely under his control. They approached a straight path roughly half a mile long where they usually picked up the pace. He knew that Soliman was faster than Yamma, who had once suffered an ankle injury as a racehorse. He always let Louise win. He had once tried to convince her that full gallop with thoroughbreds was nothing very exciting, and that it gave the horse too much power over the rider, but she refused to listen. Everything changed, of course, after her horse bolted one day, something he had only witnessed twice in his life.

  The horses knew exactly where they were going to be spurred into action and started to trot in advance, a fault he was willing to overlook. He tried to calm Soliman, but Louise smacked Yamma with her crop and yelled “Yahoo!” She disappeared like an arrow from a bow.

  In spite of his seventy-six years, Ernst Jacobi still maintained a leading position in the Swiss banking establishment. He was the son of the renowned Paul Jacobi, president of the Credit Suisse from 1938 to 1971, a man who bore considerable responsibility for the secret laundering of Nazi gold. The “leftist” Swiss press, to the extent that such a thing existed in Switzerland, referred to him as a Gnome, a member of the extremely conservative, anti-Semitic, profoundly religious cast of German-speaking Swiss nationals, who had once been described by Dürrenmatt as “girls working in a bordello while trying to keep their virginity”. Jacobi senior had also used the epithet “cheibe Usländer”, or bloody foreigners, to refer to anyone who could not be categorized as Swiss. He had once confided to a number of intimate friends that a Swiss banker had to be like the owner of a quality hotel: a civilized host who provided excellent service, and counted his takings to the last penny as his guests settled down to an evening cognac. Ernst Jacobi followed in his father’s footsteps and respected family tradition. Like his father, he was almost six and a half feet tall, had a large round head that was bald as a billiard ball, thin lips and the jowls of a toad, greedy eyes of cracked grey porcelain behind thick glasses, and was always dressed in a worn-out anthracite suit and a black tie. He looked to all the world like an undertaker’s master of ceremonies.

  He walked like a crane, slow and lurching from arthritis of the hip, which he refused to have operated upon, afraid of the consequences a full anaesthetic might have for someone of his age. He had been a widower for ten years, was father of nine children, warden of the Augustiner church, devoted knight of the Order of Malta, holder of several Vatican distinctions granted by His Holiness, friend of the Archbishop of Chur - who profited from his generous gifts - with whom he spent his summer vacations in the Graubünden mountains. He was an Opus Dei supernumerary, which he denied when necessary in line with the rule of personal humility, obedient to the prohibition against flaunting membership that had been relaxed to some degree in the 1982 statutes. In addition to two wedding rings, however, he also wore the gold ring with the inset black stone of Opus Dei, but no one had any idea what it meant. He lived alone with an aged Alsatian in a genuine eighteenth-century chalet with a weathered wooden roof hidden among the trees on the flanks of the Uetliberg, with breathtaking views of the Lake Zurich, although he paid them little attention. His primary secret was his executive position on the board of the “Stiftung Limmat”, a bank network that administered billions of Opus Dei dollars. His greatest strength was being a citizen of a peaceful country in the centre of old Europe, in which historical axes intersected and where creativity was considered a superfluous quality best left to artists and writers, brats that needed constant supervision because they tended to think as they acted and vice versa, patent proof of unreliability.

  On Tuesday 25 May 1999 at eleven forty-five a.m. - he started work at eight every day except Sunday - Jacobi was sitting at his desk in a gloomy office on the fourth floor of the imposing Credit Suisse building, Paradeplatz 8. The edifice’s nuclear bomb-proof cellars, five concrete shafts thirty metres deep, preserved the secret fortunes of the likes of Mobutu, Ceauşescu, Hailie Selassie, Hassan II, Idi Amin, Bokassa, Stroessner, Saddam Hussein, Abu Nidal, Duvalier, Noriega, Suharto, Marcos, Karadžić, Pinochet and others.

  When American journalists demonstrated in 1996, on the basis of irrefutable documentation, that billions of dollars of Holocaust money were locked up in the safes of a number of Swiss banks, Ernst Jacobi responded in an interview in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung: “A waste of breath… peanuts!”

  The telephone rang. Jacobi, who was examining a file on tax evasion and fraud, blindly lifted the receiver with his giant liver-spotted claw of a hand. A fatherly smile lit up his face. “Grüezi, dear Hervé,” he said, and listened carefully.

  As usual, his responses were limited to a monotonous drone and guarded nods of the head, his eyes fixed on a Gobelin tapestry from Brussels hanging on the wall opposite, portraying a pogrom against medieval Jews who had desecrated the body of Christ by cutting Communion wafers into pieces to add lustre to the sacrifice of goy children.

  The conversation only lasted a few minutes.

  All he did was note down a telephone number and address in Antwerp in cursive convent school handwriting and conclude the conversation with a formal “Pax”, something without meaning for either party, given their status, to be ascribed to his obsession for decorum and nothing more.

  A rigid grin appeared on his face as he hung up the receiver. He placed the index finger of his right hand on his left wrist and took his pulse in silence without referring to his watch. He waited until his heartbeat had reached what he considered an appropriate number of beats per minute and called a number in Brussels.

  “Belgacom?”

  “Oui.”

  “I would like to speak to the director general for International Communications.” While his French was correct, he had a marked guttural accent, once described in the Paris gossip rag Le Canard Enchaîné as a sickness caused by too much cold air passing through an open stable door.

  “With whom do I have the pleasure?”

  “A friend…”

  “I’ll put you through.”

  “Hello,” a neutral male voice introduced itself.

  “Ernst Jacobi from Zürich s
peaking.”

  “Aha! How is life in Switzerland, my dear Mr Jacobi?” The man’s tone of voice changed pitch.

  “Pax.”

  “In aeternum. How can I be of assistance?”

  “We have a technical problem…”

  “Continue.”

  “I have a Belgian telephone number here. We would like to have access to the international call statements for, let’s say, the last year.”

  “Is there an ongoing judicial inquiry into this number?”

  “Not that I’m aware of.”

  “Then what you ask is illegal.”

  “I’m asking on behalf of Hervé van Reyn.”

  “Hmm… I see… Can I fax the information?”

  “Thank you, my dear director general.” Ernst Jacobi hung up without saying goodbye and returned immediately to the file on the desk in front of him as if nothing had happened.

  Albert uncorked a bottle of champagne with a loud bang, something Amandine considered evidence of a lack of style, much to his enjoyment. An open tin of caviar with two mother-of-pearl spoons awaited them on a plate. He considered eating caviar from the tin as the height of decadence. They sat on the floor in riding breeches at a squat coffee table, their boots left by the door, both stinking of horse sweat. Igor lay stretched out on a blanket, sound asleep.

  As he was about to pour the champagne, Louise lit a cigarette and said casually: “I’m not really in the mood for caviar and champagne.”

  “What do you fancy then?” he asked light-heartedly, hiding his disappointment.

  “Gin and tonic and cheese crackers.”

  “OK, then I’ll have a whisky.”

  She nodded, puffed at her cigarette and inspected the varnish on her toenails, slowly wriggling her toes in the process.

  He closed the tin of caviar with an expressionless face, popped a bottle stop in the champagne and brought both to the kitchen.

  “Large or small?” he shouted after cursing under his breath.